The Power of Huacas
Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru
Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians.
Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015
The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.
Brosseder combines insights from history, anthropology, and art history (how depictions of saints, of confession, of hell, changed over time) to create a compelling narrative that is as powerful as it is surprising. . . . Very few books attempt to do what the author has done here, that is, establish what were the parameters of the discussion between European and native perceptions and how they influenced one another.
Claudia Brosseder is an important new voice in South American studies. Her tour-de-force, The Power of Huacas, explores the interactions between Andean shamans and Jesuit priests in colonial Peru through the lens of the evolving European concepts of ‘witchcraft.’ . . . Brosseder’s new understanding of colonial Andean religion is convincing, innovative, and thoroughly researched.
Claudia Brosseder is a Privatdozentin at Munich University and holds a research position in the Excellence Center for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University. She is the author of Im Bann der Sterne. Caspar Peucer, Philipp Melanchthon und andere Wittenberger Astrologen.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Land Obsessed with Confessions; or, The Historians’ Insights into the World of Colonial Andean Religious Specialists
2. Civil Versus Ecclesiastical Authorities
3. The Sickening Powers of Christianity: A Response by Andean Religious Specialists
4. Talking to Demons: The Intensified Persecution of Andean Religious Specialists (ca. 1609–1700)
5. From Outspoken Criticism to Clandestine Resistance
6. Glimpses of the Protective Powers of Andean Rituals in the Highlands
7. Andean Notions of Nature and Harm, and the Disempowerment of Andean Healers
8. Weeping Statues: The End of Jesuit Demonology and the Survival of an Andean Culture
9. Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Consulted Archives
Bibliography
Download an extended bibliography.Index
